State of the Art

The Incredible Disappearing Video-On-Demand Box Office

Snowpiercer

The ubiquity of opening-weekend box-office numbers has become such that you can scarcely glance at a Monday-morning broadsheet or newscast, or dip into water-cooler conversation without encountering them. But in the “post-theatrical era” of moviegoing (pace Paul Schrader), those numbers only tell a partial tale. With more movies than ever premiering simultaneously in theaters and on VOD—and more streaming services than ever by which to watch them—home viewers represent a sizable chunk of the potential audience for indie, foreign, and documentary films. Except that the exact numbers about who’s watching what are kept well hidden from journalists and, to some extent, filmmakers themselves. The venerable box-office reporting service Rentrak publishes a weekly list of the 10 most popular VOD titles (typically dominated by big-studio fare that premiered in theaters months earlier), and other tidbits can be gleaned by checking out the top-performing titles on iTunes and Amazon. But beyond that, distributors are left to their own devices about what to report, and most opt to keep mum unless they have something to crow about (as when Weinstein Company subsidiary RADiUS issued press releases trumpeting the stellar VOD performances of Snowpiercer and CITIZENFOUR). In a Deadline Hollywood interview published in late 2013, veteran sales agent John Sloss announced that his distribution company, Producers Distribution Agency, would begin reporting weekly VOD grosses on the website of its sister company, FilmBuff, and challenged other distributors to follow suit. (He also noted how the absence of thorough VOD reporting allows distributors to creatively conceal VOD profits from filmmakers on balance sheets.) But one year later, VOD numbers remain so elusive as to beg the question: where’s the beef?—Scott Foundas

If a Tree Falls…

A Girl at My Door

In 2014, close to 1,000 movies opened theatrically for at least one week. Who knows how many more debuted on VOD or are still hustling for a payoff on the festival circuit? The problem is no longer being able to make a movie—anyone with a $200 camera and a couple of loyal, enthusiastic friends can do that—but getting it noticed, which is another matter. It is interesting, however, that on my list of top 20 releases, there is only one debut feature—The Babadook—while two more lead my unreleased films list: Arthur Jafa’s documentary essay Dreams Are Colder Than Death and a Korean cop film by female director July Jung, A Girl at My Door, which has yet to play anywhere in the U.S. Among the various groups that bestow awards for first features, the same five titles have garnered support: The Babadook and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (both art/horror films by female directors); Dear White People and Obvious Child, both in-your-face comic attacks on, respectively, racism and patriarchy, and both with a command of film language that is barely at sitcom level; and Nightcrawler, a mainstream star vehicle that I watched to its lugubrious, forced conclusion, looking for clues as to how Jake Gyllenhaal got his eyes to look as if he’d been shooting meth for a year without, I fervently hope, actually doing so. I am sure that among the thousand theatrically released films and likely just as many available on Internet platforms, there are many more first features at least as worthy as these, but the odds against them getting attention have never been greater.—Amy Taubin

Beat the Clock

CITIZENFOUR

With the rise of durational cinema (long takes, often leisurely with their storytelling cues) it’s easy to lose sight of other experiments in which the passage of time itself plays a role in newfound ways. This year, the distinctive, improbable achievement of Boyhood delivers on the promise of cinema in an unprecedented way, with its narrative compression and the sheer indexical wonder of the endeavor—a couple of real-life kids, growing up as if in their natural habitat, contained in a single movie. It’s the kind of feat that art seems to spontaneously pull off from time to time as if in reaction to the turbulent complexity of modern life, a project conceived and built over a number of years yet attuned to this moment. It arrived the same year as another ambitious effort, Interstellar, the creation of that strange creature known as a blockbuster auteur: Christopher Nolan, fully exercising a mightily totalizing impulse he previewed in Inception (and, in a different key, Memento). Here was an attempt to envision The End, and with it, a “plausible” workaround: in an era of 3-D multiplex glut, an effort to genuinely visualize four dimensions as never before outside of a quantum physics textbook. Coming at the process of aging from different angles, Interstellar and Boyhood treat it as the ultimate, poignant special effect. But to truly capture the current moment required one more entry in what you might call the redefinition of “event movie”: CITIZENFOUR. The days-long hotel debriefing that forms the core of Laura Poitras’s documentary takes place in something like a heightened present, rendered hyper-vivid by the high stakes and potential jeopardy faced by its subject, Edward Snowden. At the same time, as its hero makes his fateful decision to go public, the future changes irrevocably for him, and for all of us.—Nicolas Rapold

New Cinematic Glossary

Inherent Vice

“Film” isn’t the only formerly concrete bit of cinematic vernacular that has segued into euphemism in the digital age. “Indie” films are now often financed and/or distributed by major corporations (or their subsidiaries), with budgets in excess of $20 million, while “studio” movies are increasingly funded (in part or in full) by independent production funds and mini-studios like Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, Thomas Tull’s Legendary Entertainment, and Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment. “Movie stars” move with unprecedented freedom between movies and “television,” which no longer means just a piece of living- room furniture but merely a category of content that can be viewed on any number of portable devices at the whim of the viewer. Some movies even play on television first, via VOD, before starting their “theatrical release,” which may mean one theater in one city for one week. Of course, there are always “festivals,” so many of them in fact that this word, too, has all but lost its meaning. Last but hardly least is “Hollywood” itself, which is now more likely to mean Louisiana than California, or perhaps a fading mirage—like the vanished L.A. communities of Inherent Vice—of what moviemaking once was and might one day be again.—Scott Foundas

The New Man

The Imitation Game

Benedict Cumberbatch is a brilliant actor who has suddenly become a movie star. I suspected he had a shot at it when I first noticed him in a supporting role in Atonement (07). He’s a mass of contradictions—the most necessary attribute for a star. His mercurial intelligence is at odds with a slightly languorous physicality that is at once graceful and galumphing. He is more often cool than hot, but he almost always resolves both ends of the psychological/physical temperature spectrum into a constant, perceptible simmer. He is equally convincing playing heterosexuals, as in the TV miniseries Parade’s End (12), in which he was both deeply responsible and profoundly romantic, homosexuals, as in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (11) and The Imitation Game, and a willfully asexual, very modern Sherlock Holmes in television’s Sherlock. Regardless of the gender of his characters’ objects of desire, he is matter-of-factly male without the need to either assert or defend his masculinity or the privilege it bestows. For that reason alone, he is, at least on screen, the new man.—Amy Taubin